An Illustrated Map Inside Shakespeare and Company

In Bruce Handy’s article this month about arguably the most famous bookstore in the world, Shakespeare and Company, you can’t help but want to jump on a plane to Paris and be there. But just in case you can’t, here’s Handy’s description of the interior:

I like to think of it as a half-planned, half-accreted, site-specific folk-art masterpiece: the Watts Towers of bookselling, with its warren of narrow passageways lined by casually carpentered bookshelves; its small rooms adorned with whimsical names (OLD SMOKY READING ROOM and BLUE OYSTER TEAROOM); its owner’s favorite epigrams painted above doorways and on steps (LIVE FOR HUMANITY and BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE); its scavenged floorings, including, in one of the ground-floor rooms, marble tiling Whitman is said to have stolen decades ago from Montparnasse Cemetery and laid down in an abstract mosaic around the store’s “wishing well”—a hole in which customers toss coins to be harvested by the store’s more impecunious residents. (Sign: FEED THE STARVING WRITERS.)

And to add on to that, we asked illustrator Jess Levitz to paint the layout of the store, and some of its most famous features.